Obama keeps quiet on race — again

America’s been waiting five years to hear more from President Barack Obama on race.

The waiting continues.

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Trayvon Martin is dead and George Zimmerman was found not guilty — leaving many looking to the president to lead the thoughtful, national conversation about black-white relations they thought was promised in his 2008 campaign speech on race.

Yes, there’s a double standard. No previous president has been asked so often for his personal feelings on race. But for the first black president, that double standard is part of his life, and of his presidency. And black leaders say that, especially after last year’s election, the time has come to deliver more than what he has so far.

“The president is now in his second term. Because of the Voting Rights Act and the Trayvon Martin case” and the disproportionately greater impact on the black community from the recession, said National Urban League President Marc Morial, “I think that the table is set for the president to think about how he can address these issues not just in words, but renew some of the issues that he’s championed.”

For Morial, that means Obama, with the help of Congress, taking back up the JOBS Act and gun control legislation, and, in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, doing so explicitly in the context of race.

Some older black leaders admit a sense of resignation after years of disappointment. Though Obama’s expected to be asked to elaborate in a series of interviews with Spanish language television stations scheduled for Tuesday, they haven’t heard much from the president since the Florida jury returned Saturday night, and they weren’t expecting to.

“It’s not unusual for the president to avoid ‘black’ and ‘race’ and ‘poverty,’ but we’re pretty much satisfied with his statement as it relates to the Zimmerman verdict,” said Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.).

But given the amount of attention the case got in the news and in protests since the verdict means to Obama’s close supporters, he may have a new chance now to seize control of the conversation in a way he hasn’t to date.

“This is an opportunity for us not to kick the can down the road again, and I think it’s a chance for the president to get larger than the regular politics and the racial riffs would dictate,” said Cornell Belcher, an African-American and a pollster who worked on both of Obama’s presidential campaigns. “It’s an opportunity to create an understanding. A lot of white America doesn’t seem to understand the hurt that’s in the African-American community today.”

Whether the president will take that opportunity, Belcher said — “that’s a different question.”

In this situation, Obama’s thoughts aren’t much of a mystery. His statement last March that “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” was one of the rawest moments of his presidency — and one of the rare public comments from the president about his race, and the realities that come with it.

After the verdict, he issued a written statement observing, “I know this case has elicited strong passions,” without acknowledging that some of those strong passions had been elicited within him.

He didn’t even mention race, nodding only obliquely at the need “to widen the circle of compassion and understanding in our own communities.”

The White House has largely resisted efforts to dissect the meaning and intent behind the Sunday statement. But pressed Monday for more on Obama’s personal reaction, White House press secretary Jay Carney said the president’s feelings were apparent in the bland written release.

“I think his statement yesterday reflects how the loss of a young person is a source of great anguish and pain for the parents of that person, for the community where that person lived and for the whole country,” Carney said, “because the loss is greater when a young person dies because the potential of that life is so unfulfilled.”

Nothing specifically about race. Nothing about policy, beyond the call for better gun control in the president’s statement over the weekend and repeated by Carney in the briefing room.

To Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) that’s the real issue. There needs to be a national conversation on race, she said, but the president isn’t necessarily the one who has to lead it. Moore said that for Obama, the Zimmerman verdict should be another call to put forward policy addressing racial inequality in education, economics and criminal justice — with or without the bigger race in America discussion.

“As far as I’m concerned, he does not have to put a dashiki on, wave a red-black-and-green flag, put up a black power fist,” Moore said. “What I need him to do is try to level the playing field to make sure that African-Americans have the same opportunities.”

Obama’s in a precarious position. The president needed to ensure that the protests didn’t become riots more intense than the confrontations in California Monday evening that led to several arrests, said Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, and that the millions of people who might not agree with him about the verdict wouldn’t be jolted into polarization by a distorted comment out of the Oval Office.